UK- TATE BRITAIN- COLLECTIVE TEXTIL and against war,etc..

  

 

 Cornelia Parker War Room 2015 © Cornelia Parker

Experience Cornelia Parker’s mesmerising large-scale installations

Cornelia Parker is one of Britain's best loved and most acclaimed contemporary artists. 

Always driven by curiosity, she reconfigures domestic objects to question our relationship with the world. 

Using transformation, playfulness and storytelling, she engages with important issues of our time, be it violence, ecology or human rights.

The exhibition brings together such iconic suspended works as Thirty Pieces of Silver 1988–9 and Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 1991; the immersive War Room 2015 and Magna Carta 2015, her monumental collective embroidery, as well as her films and a wealth of her innovative drawings, prints and photographs. Some works will spill out beyond the confines of the exhibition and infiltrate the permanent collection, in dialogue with the historical works they reference.

 THE WAR ROOM

I was invited to make a piece of work about the First World War. I had always wanted to go to the poppy factory in Richmond, London. Artificial poppies have been made there since 1922. They are sold to raise for money for ex-military personnel and their families.

When I visited the factory, I saw this machine that had rolls of red paper with perforations where the poppies had been punched out. The fact that the poppies are absent is poignant, because obviously a lot of people didn’t come back from the First World War, and other wars since. In this room there’s something like 300,000 holes, and there’s many more lives lost than that.

I decided to make War Room like a tent, suspending the material like fabric. It’s based on the magnificent tent which Henry VIII had made for a peace summit with the French king in 1520, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. About a year later they were at war again.

Cornelia Parker

 POLITICS

This is the time we all need to politically engage. We need art more than ever because it’s like a digestive system, a way of processing.

Cornelia Parker

In addition to film, Parker’s commitment to politics and social justice is shown through her photography, sculpture, drawing and the act of collective embroidery, as shown in this room.

Collaboration is central to Parker’s working process. In the Blackboard drawings she worked with school children of different primary school age groups, and Magna Carta (An Embroidery) involved over 200 people, each stitching different key words particular to their situation. They include Baroness Doreen Lawrence, who stitched the words ‘justice’, ‘denial’ and ‘delay’; Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales who stitched ‘user’s manual’ and Edward Snowden who stitched the word ‘Liberty’.